


Echoes

by eris



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: M/M, Prompt Fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-09
Updated: 2013-06-09
Packaged: 2017-12-14 10:26:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/835859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eris/pseuds/eris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If it were predictable, they wouldn't call it shock.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Echoes

**Author's Note:**

> meme prompt: Finch doesn't handle people he loves being put in soon-i'll-explode-and-you'll-be-left-alone situations.

He woke to a smothering dark, but his first instinct was to freeze, to listen, to absorb as much information as possible before the heuristics of his terror called to fight or flight. The room was an indistinct maze of edges and shadows, but the windows on the far wall glittered with familiar skyline: bright blinking data points to interpolate. His wrists and fingers flexed freely, unbound. His constriction was only the press of a too-heavy duvet, the twist of carefully-chosen high-threadcount sheets. Harold had always been very particular about his sheets.

This space was his own space. As soon as he knew it, he also knew that he was not alone. That he was safe.

"Hey," and this voice was the sum of all necessary evidence. "Doing all right?"

Harold was sweating, and his pulse raced too high and light in his chest: the heartbeat of a small startled animal, too recently alarmed to respond to his marshalling reason. This bed was _his_ bed; his condo, his view. His mouth was gritty and sour. His voice might have wavered if he spoke, even broken, so he allowed instead the small grunt of a man still fumbling toward consciousness. It wouldn't fool John Reese for even a moment, but it would prompt him to maintain the polite fiction of being fooled. John was a conscientious man, when he cared to be. He cared very much as a general rule.

Harold breathed. He waited with forcible patience for his body's parasympathetic response. He was not alone; (yet) he was safe.

"Just a minute. Don't try to get up yet."

Harold did not try to get up. John's silhouette had unfurled from the chair by the windows and he strode with confidence to the ensuite bath, as though he had any right to know the floorplan already. A light flickered on briefly, then a tap, then silence and shadow again. It was a soothingly mundane sequence to observe, something sensible, routine--but the fractional subsidence of panic left a new vacuum for pain to inhabit. Harold's throat was sandpaper dry and his joints ached against the mattress beneath them. There was a throbbing at the base of his neck, climbing upward to a hollow drum at the occipital region of his skull, and when he shifted under the blanket something sharper lanced its way down his spine and crackled along his nerves like sparks from stripped wire. Heat welled in his eyes but he bit down on it hard, reined it in. These were for the most part perennial pains, familiar as his sheets, if rarely so emphatic as this. Only in the aftermath of especially ill-advised fieldwork, when he willfully trespassed the limits he knew perfectly well.

"You're not injured," John said when he returned, anticipating the question in his conscientious way. He brought with him a water glass and several little white pills, and Harold had, for the most part, schooled his face still. "Took a pretty heavy fall, though. Take these; it'll help with the pain."

The pain was like a wide-aperture lens, blurring out everything but the fixed focal point of John leaning near at his bedside. Harold made a weak effort to order the circumstances leading up to this moment, but he could only skim blindly in the shallows where those details should be. Vague olfactory sense memories: smoke and wet asphalt and petrol. The doppler shift of sirens; the red smear of streetlights on rain. John moved closer still, to slide a palm under Harold's back, supporting his neck as he gently but firmly pressed forward, until Harold was angled to drink without choking on it.

John's smell was sharper; sweat and antiseptic. Harold allowed every touch, so he had no choice but to accept what was offered. He took the glass and willed his hands not to tremble. The pills weren't his own, so they must have been John's; he swallowed them down all the same. When John's hand withdrew a heat lingered there in its absence, stirring new memories no less indistinct, flashes at too low resolution to make out anything but grainy swatches of colour and dark. The confluence of shaky impressions felt like something unarguably part of him yet somehow foreign at the same time, a wavering dissociation which uncomfortably recalled his exposure to MDMA.

John's eyes were tracking every minute movement, mild but alert in the usual way. He had assumed an unthreatening posture, consciously minimised his advantage in stature so that he didn't loom over much. The effort was transparent and wholly unsuccessful, but there was a sort of tenderness to the gesture that resonated somewhere deep in Harold's chest. Throat wetted now, Harold said, "How did you know about this place?"

"I asked you." John took the cup back and set it on the bedside table. Harold's glasses were there, neatly folded, but he didn't bother to reach for them. "And you told me. Sorry, couldn't find any coasters."

Harold squinted up at him in the dark. The flagrant deflection was enough to sharpen his focus a little more, to expand his shallow depth of field. John's slacks were scuffed at the knees and he was wearing just a white undershirt; his left forearm was bandaged and his knuckles were scraped raw, though recently cleaned. There was a small cut on the crest of his cheek, a half-moon curving around his eye and flaking dried blood, faintly purple at the corners with bruising. To the untrained eye he looked exactly like cheap hired muscle; an undersirable element. This was a seventeenth-floor penthouse condo and Harold was fairly confident he'd kept the address to himself. "I certainly don't remember that conversation."

"Well, Harold," John said, with his bizarre and inappropriate lilt, "that's probably because you were in shock."

"Don't be ridiculous," Harold snapped back, automatically.

The smile flattened away from John's face, a gradual shifting of muscle that somehow left its initial existence in doubt--but his voice remained even, low and reassuring in a way that was suddenly, inexcusably soporific. "Thought I might have to punch out your doorman," he said, and it was probably a joke, but it wasn't always easy to tell with John Reese. "Funny thing, though: he seemed to already know the name Rooney."

All of Harold's identities and safe houses had contingencies in place for John, now. He did not say as much. Instead, he fought back the press of fog on his brain with renewed vigour, and said, "What happened?"

"I told him you had too many drinks at a meeting."

Some small part of Harold's brain took offence to this, but its protests were hardly relevant now. "You know what I meant, Mr Reese."

John hesitated, as though weighing the odds he would be allowed to postpone the full answer, then visibly folded. "There was an explosion." He made a shrug of it, like it was a mundane meteorological fact. "It's over now and the number's in custody. You'll have to forgive me for taking advantage," and there was a wry curl to these words, "but I had to get you somewhere safe. I'll fill in the rest of it later. For now you really should sleep."

Harold allowed himself a generous span of silence to absorb what he could from the account, but even these simple expressions refused to parse neatly, and he could only frown. "After all this--"

"If it were predictable," John interrupted--quiet, soft, and completely incontrovertible, "they wouldn't call it _shock_. Go to sleep, Harold."

All fight began to drain out of him, a disconcerting reminder of that slow but inevitable erosion of resistance where John Reese was concerned. He wondered, abstractly, at how they kept ending up in these situations, how utterly conventional helplessness could become. A sigh had been knotting up something in Harold's throat, so he closed his eyes and let it scrape free, a long gravelly drag from his lungs. "There are guest rooms down the hall," he said finally, feeling strangely hollowed out by it, bruised. "Please make yourself comfortable."

John's proximity was a tangible thing; Harold felt more than heard him shuffle, shifting his weight on his feet. "If you'd rather I go--"

"No." He was startled by the violence with which the word clawed out from his throat, immediate, instinctive. He opened his eyes too late to soften the force of it, but John looked somehow even more at ease now, and Harold was suddenly quite sure he had never felt gratitude with the depth and intensity that he felt in that instant. "No, please stay."

"All right," John said, and there was a smile at the edge of the words, whole and true. The slope of his shoulders relaxed completely. He reached out a hand and gave Harold's own shoulder a brief, awkward squeeze, and for one single sun-bright moment--just before he gave in to the dark undertow of sleep--Harold thought of the terminating condition in a linear recursion, and everything was simple, complete, right with the world.

 

Waking drew considerably more effort the second time around. He grew aware in slowly overlapping layers of the warmth on his face, of a sweet scent hanging in the air, drifting in and out of focus with the caprice of a childhood dream. But when Harold opened his eyes at last, the sunlight pouring in through the windows was real and entirely too bright, enough to ache behind his pupils and burn off the lingering fog of narcotic.

Harold stared up at the high white ceiling with and made a tentative assessment of his body. There was pain, but the pain had diffused to a dull throb, not so much worse than was typical, and it couldn't possibly be the case that someone in the apartment was _baking_ \--

He felt a muffled thump at the foot of the bed, and when he looked down again Bear was looking right back at him, tail beating a soft inquiry on the duvet. 

"Taking liberties, I see," he scolded, experimental. His tongue felt clumsy and dry, but there was only a faint rasp to his voice. The cottony feeling bleached away with each passing moment in the sun, though judging the angle of light stretched across his floorboards he hadn't slept more than six hours or so. Vicodin, then, and Bear knew perfectly well he was _not_ allowed on the furniture. Harold turned on the deepest frown he could manage, but Bear only stared back with eyes both calm and watchful in an exasperatingly familiar way. A brief, silent contest of wills ensued, until the moment collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity and Harold conceded with a sigh. He scrubbed the grit from his eyes with a palm, and reached at last for his glasses.

There was a blanket folded neatly on the chair by the windows. There was also a book laid out beside it, a pulp crime novel he recognised by the old faded cover art. Harold breathed in; out. He unclenched his fists from the sheets and pushed them away. Bear rested his head on his paws with contentment, and watched.

Managing his distribution of weight always required a certain degree of concentration, but standing was the most difficult part; once upright, some internal inertia carried him forward. It wasn't far to the bathroom. He could certainly indulge in a few more moments' private composure, before--

Before the necessary negotiation of external forces, motion, life. Harold found he could remember the precise moment of impact now. It was a constant thrum in the background of his mind, like tinnitis; deafening without a distraction. (Only that moment: the throb of the noise in his chest, the hot rain of debris and glass shards and John's body covering his own--)

He ran the shower just to the edge of scalding. He leaned into the tile and waited, but the tension would not bleed away, the noise of it wouldn't subside into the soft roar of the water's spray. Behind his eyelids he tried to work through the impossible density of the thing, to picture instead John Reese moving in these wide open spaces, Harold Partridge's airy white condo, just walking from room to room with that unassuming grace, limned by--only by sunlight from the floor-to-ceiling windows, because he was alive, safe--

Harold's heart was a small cramping muscle in his chest, wrenching painfully, too tight, but he willed his mental image to uncurl, to expand in the warmth, fill the space with itself. John would have assessed the place's defensibility, noted all exits and entry points by now. He probably hated the way the lift opened directly into the apartment. Perhaps it made him uncomfortable, to be so many floors up from the ground. (Or maybe he had stood on the terrace and looked down to the city and smiled his shy little half-smile, pleased with the view of his home--)

And now John was _cooking_. He had rifled through Harold's cabinets, formed opinions of Harold's utensils, used Harold's sink and his eggs and his fridge and it should feel like the worst of invasions, yet Harold found a startling permeability to himself in this fantasy. It was such a fragile thing, yet somehow overwhelming, a rush of something like--belonging, welling up and then spilling over into a sob that wracked his whole body, and when Harold finally dared to put a hand on himself he came so hard and so fast it was momentarily blinding.

Only later--when he pulled on a loose button-down shirt with a guilty tremor lingering in his fingertips--only later did Harold realise that he must have allowed John to undress him the night before, strip him down to his underclothes and tuck him into his bed like it was remotely his place, his obligation. The thought rested with a curious discreteness at the centre of his mind, unmoveable yet innoculous at the same time: that this casual exercise of physical intimacy had not even registered, had caused him no particular alarm.

Harold pressed his glasses back onto his nose and his surroundings settled back into properly distinct lines and edges. Bear was no longer waiting on the bed. Harold followed out to the hall, to the open, to the bright glare of light suffusing his expansive living room. Outside the tall windows Manhattan sprawled toward the horizon, evidence of the world at large, a busy tableau of cars and skyscrapers and wires and life so abundant it was utterly anonymous.

John was there in the kitchen, Harold's kitchen, watching Harold approach with his particular look of bemused patience. The reality of him was briefly difficult to reconcile with the memory, a peculiar offset from Harold's mental construction, like a stereoscopic image viewed without the anaglyph filters. John was holding a cast-iron frying pan in one hand and a salt-shaker in the other, and Harold only barely clamped down on the sudden hysterical urge to laugh. Instead he let out a shaky breath and forced himself to keep moving until the kitchen island was under his hands, solid and steadying, and John watched it all, smiling the faint, tender smile he usually hid with his hand.

John cocked his head and said, "Bear warned me to start on the eggs. How are you feeling?"

Harold blinked back at him, still dumb-founded by the sheer normality of it all, the perfect ordinary simplicity of _breakfast_. The oven was still warm. The counters were conscientiously spotless, used dishes stacked neatly in the sink. John was wearing the same clothes from the previous night, but he had rinsed the gel from his hair and slicked it back with water alone. It was sticking at strange angles now, quite a mess. There was a trace dusting of flour on his forearms.

Harold said, "fine," then swallowed and tried again, louder. "I'm perfectly fine. Did you sleep?"

John made a non-committal sound and turned back to the stove. He gave a quick practised jerk and egg folded over neatly in the pan. The whole kitchen smelled warm and rich and inviting. There were cinnamon rolls cooling on the counter. Harold said, "You needn't have gone to this much trouble..." and trailed off, lost.

He couldn't see John's face anymore, but he could hear the soft curl of amusement to his reply. John graciously declined to comment on the obviousness of his remark; instead he shrugged one shoulder and said, "Really surprised to find so much food in here, Harold."

"The house-keeper restocks it on Sundays," Harold said, unthinking. John would certainly unspool from these simple domestic facts far more than Harold had ever intended to reveal. The thought felt somehow distanced from him; after a moment, he realised it was just that he didn't care. Those locked rooms were empty now, wide and bright, echoing strangely inside him.

John turned off the gas knob and plated an omelette, then turned back to regard Harold with the deliberate arched brow of scepticism. So Harold tried to gather his thoughts, order them back into their usual neat geometry. The effort was hysterically like the quadrature of a circle. "Oh, believe me," he managed, "she's been vetted more closely than many intelligence operatives."

"I believe you," John assured him, smiling. "Food's ready now."

 

Harold had chosen this condo for the view, and because Partridge was ostentatious enough to keep 9000 square feet entirely to himself in Manhattan. The french doors in the living room opened out to a terrace overlooking Gramercy Park, and John had already set the table outside, so Harold could only follow him, only sit down and wait while John laid out food with unexpected flourish. The morning was clear and not overly windy, and might have been chilly in the shade, but the sun shone down on Harold's shoulders, sinking into his skin, encouraging the languor that had begun to spread after his shower. John poured him orange juice and then sat across from him. Bear settled under the table, just barely brushing his feet as though to offer a constant quiet reminder of his presence.

Harold did not expect to be hungry, but after the first bite he took another, then a third, and before long he had eaten everything on his plate. John watched him over his own fork, looking pleased, but he averted his eyes when Harold tried to meet them, some small play of modesty Harold couldn't place as real or affected.

Cooking was one of the few skills for which Harold had cultivated an appreciation but made no effort to acquire; something about it seemed inherently like a performance art, and he had spent the preponderance of his life avoiding an audience. He couldn't begin to fathom this alchemy by which John had transformed his sparse pantry into a meal he might expect from the rare restauraunt he deigned patronise on a regular basis. Even the omelette had a pleasant earthy taste, filled with mushrooms and shallots and gruyère. He felt a helpless, absurd instinct of protectiveness surge through him, for the thought of this man bent over the counter tutting with concentration as he chopped shiitake with military precision. For the John Reese who could very possibly kill a man with a mixing bowl, that had spent the night hunched in on a wretchedly uncomfortable armchair and got up early to make Harold breakfast.

"This is nice," John offered, eventually. He was looking out over the city, leaving the referent ambiguous, but Harold found himself saying "Yes," far too quickly. John's answering smile was nearer a smirk, though somehow it wasn't unkind. Harold took a long drink from his juice to distract from the heat in his face, but John made no comment, only passed the remains of a cinnamon roll to Bear under the table.

"It will be your fault if he gets fat," Harold protested, faintly. Bear did not seem concerned. His tail beat against Harold's shoe, utterly content.

"I'll run him later," John shrugged. "Something tells me Harold Partridge holds a key to the park."

The whole conversation was so ordinary, so incongruous with lingering thrum in the back of Harold's skull that everything felt slightly unreal. Harold folded his napkin and tried to ignore the irrational stutter in his chest. "Dogs are not allowed, Mr Reese."

"Something tells me that won't be a problem either." John leaned back in his chair, looking smug.

It was far too much effort to maintain a look of disapproval, so Harold didn't bother. He thought instead of how easily John accepted the fact of these constructed identities, the levels of detail that verged on pure idiosyncrasy. The recognition was calming; grounding. Nathan would have called it a pathology; John Reese only ever seemed entertained. Perhaps it was only that John had spent so much of his own life in covert operations--but then there had been the dog-eared Burdett novel tucked beside the blanket in Harold's bedroom this morning, not a valuable edition, nothing special. Hundreds of books in the condo's library and still John had managed to root out the one piece of authenticity in the entire building. If this was still a game played between them, it would seem John had been winning it for a very long time.

John made a hum and begun to gather the plates. "So," he said, in the light conversational tone that was never remotely so innocent. "Out of curiosity, what exactly did you tell your doorman?"

Harold watched him stack the dishes. His glass was empty, so he only turned it in his hands, unaccountably restless. "I mentioned my asset manager," he said. "You're perfectly conversant with the cover story, Mr Reese."

"I was lucky he didn't call the cops, Harold. He probably would have, except I'm pretty sure he thinks that we're dating."

Harold considered this. He was annoyed more by the inaccuracy than the implication, though he did not relish the prospect of knowing looks and innuendo impinging upon the privacy he had cultivated here. "As your employer," he frowned, "I'm not entirely sure that's appropriate."

John was watching his face with intolerable amusement, and Harold was abruptly aware he had been examining the thing as Partridge, had slipped into the shell of that cover by reflex more than anything else, so that he wasn't even sure what he might have said otherwise. "It certainly wouldn't reflect well on you," John was saying, smiling under his lashes, "if you dumped me after the first time I stayed over."

Harold found he had no response, but John did not wait for one. He had already stood with a stack of plates balanced on his arm, and so Harold followed him back into the kitchen, feeling obscurely unsatisfied.

 

Harold was sitting on his couch when it hit him. John had cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher himself, leaving Harold to watch, uselessly, while he erased all evidence of his presence from the kitchen with the casually thorough nature of someone accustomed to managing crime scenes. Then he'd looked Harold up and down once, flashed a brief smile, and stepped out to take Bear on his promised walk. Just like that, the condo was clean, empty of motion and sound.

It was very much like he had never been there at all.

Moments seemed to dilate in the empty room, to melt into a dreamlike inexactitude. Suddenly divorced of context, Harold had a peculiar sense of his perspective telescoping backward, until a terrifying vastness of space dwarfed him completely, too bright, blinding. The thrumming noise was everywhere now, exactly his resonant frequency, shuddering down to his marrow. There was no warmth pressing in at his back. He tried to call out but his throat worked soundlessly, or he couldn't hear over the noise, or there was no one to hear it because he was so utterly alone.

Then, some indeterminate time later, he became aware of the hands on his shoulders, the soft breath against his cheek. John was there. John was kneeling in front of him and murmuring near his ear. He found he could breathe easier when he breathed in time with that breath, so he did. John made encouraging noises. John smelled like sweat, cinnamon, the city.

"Good, Harold," he was saying. "That's good. You're fine."

Harold wanted to laugh, but he didn't dare open his mouth, not to laugh or to correct this wildly incorrect notion. Whether or not _he_ was fine was so far from relevant he wasn't sure he could even frame it in words. Eventually he managed to say, "no."

"Okay," John said, agreeable in his completely ridiculous way. "Okay, but you will be. We'll be fine. Look at me, Harold. _Harold_."

Harold looked at him. John's face was very near to his. His breath hitched and his whole upper body shook with it, humiliatingly obvious. He said, "I'm sorry. I'm not sure what--I'm sorry."

John lifted a hand from his shoulder and pressed it to Harold's forehead. The backs of his fingers were cool, comfortable, and Harold let the touch expand, fill the space, well up inside him for the first time completely, impossibly real. John's eyes were soft and watchful and at that exact moment Harold wanted very much to kiss him. John would meet him there, he knew; John was always there. It only surprised him for a moment, only by its remarkable clarity. Like something that had been just under the surface for a very long time, waiting for him to work it out; an equation he'd forgotten to simplify.

"Harold," John said, searching his face. He tapped Harold's temple with a fingertip, gently. "Stay with me, here."

He did start to laugh, then. He closed his eyes and leaned forward, letting his forehead rest against John's, letting the whole of himself fall into the moment, the rush. It felt like something--raw, broken open, laid bare. It was easier than he had always expected and far less fragile than he'd imagined. He could have lost this; he could so easily have never had it to begin with. That very thought gave it strength. He said, "Do you know, I think I'd really prefer if we both were to live? You have an alarming propensity for explosives. It's a habit we absolutely must break."

John huffed out a breath against his face, halfway between a snort and a laugh. "Sure, Harold. Just as soon as you tell me why _your_ first instinct is to move _towards a bomb_."

His answering laugh might have sounded unhinged, but it felt like something was unwinding in his chest, and he wanted to let it free. Long moments passed, then finally John leaned back, and Harold sighed in the empty space, feeling boneless, wrung out, overwhelmed by the relief of it. He shook his head slowly and managed the old rueful half-smile. "You would think this sort of thing would get--easier."

"I'm a little shaky on the math," John said, smiling back. "But it's always seemed to me the less you have, the more you have to lose."

The truth of it was momentarily startling; then resolution settled back into him, calm. This was so much more than enough; it felt like more than his body could contain. The noise was only the pulse of blood in his ears, and John's breath near to his; the soft rustle of fabric as John settled down on the floor at his feet, leaning into his thigh, just a deliberate weight, anchoring him to the world. Harold pressed back, aware that John's hand had found his. He closed his eyes and leaned back into the cushions, warm and tired and desperately happy to be alive in that moment.

He said, "Stay with me, here," just a quiet echo in the immensity of space and light around them, but John squeezed his hand and said, "Always."


End file.
